So the preparations for this year GStreamer Conference 2010 is progressing at a healthy pace. Today I put the list of speakers and abstracts online, which combined with the conference timetable should let you plan the event pretty well.

I recommend everyone to look over the list of speakers and abstracts, because I am sure there will be things there everyone will find interesting.

I would also like to remind everyone that we got some great talks happening as part of CE Linux as well like Benjamin Gaignard of ST Ericsson talking about Android and GStreamer, Stefan Kost of Nokia talking about Meego and GStreamer and finally Arun Raghavan from Collabora Multimedia speaking about Pulse Audio. So make sure not to miss the CE Linux days.

You find registration information on the main conference website and be sure to register early as space is limited, so if you wait to long you might not be able to register at all.

So the registration system for the GStreamer Conference 2010 is now open together with the registration for CE Linux Conference Europe 2010.

You find the registration for both conferences here so I hope to see as many of you as possible registered. I think we have a great program and some really interesting talks!

The full Collabora Multimedia crew is in The Hague this week for GUADEC and our annual get together. It is the first time all 12 of us are together and its nice to spend some time face to face to get to know each other beyond IRC.

Currently doing a little hackfest at our hotel, pushing forward some cool stuff like echo cancellation, PiTiVi and more.

The preparations for the GStreamer 2010 conference is moving ahead at full speed. Today I was able to put the speakers list and program online showing out strong lineup of presenters and topics.

The actual GStreamer conference website is here for those of you who missed it the first time.

So be sure to mark 26th of October in your calendar so you can attend.
There are some great GStreamer related talks that will happen as part of
the CE Linux conference too, but I will wait until that program has been announced before letting you know more about those :)

With summer and conference season starting we just got a new batch of Collabora Multimedia t-shirts delivered to the office. This time people got to choose their own colours and thus we ended up with a more colourful set of shirts!

Was happy to see this OpenOffice and GStreamer blog entry today about how OpenOffice has chosen GStreamer to power the multimedia support in OpenOffice going forward. While users of OpenOffice on Linux have been able to enjoy GStreamer support for quite some time thanks to the efforts of Novell, it is still good to see that the upstream project is also coming around to officially supporting this. Currently only enabled by default for Unix/Linux systems I hope we will see it used on Windows and on MacOS X eventually. A big welcome to the OpenOffice community into the GStreamer community :)

One of our main goals here at Collabora is to move the open source multimedia platform forward. Due to this we are investing a lot of time and effort into projects such as GStreamer, Telepathy, PiTiVi, Empathy and PulseAudio. So when we are able to play our part in making sure open source and linux desktops keep abreast of current development, like our work on WebM with Google and Entropy Wave we of course feel extra happy.

Well I thought it was time to announce another important effort we have just undertaken. Thanks to the generous support of NLnet, the same guys who helped Collabora make the Muji multi party chat extension for XMPP, we are now kicking of an effort to add echo cancellation support to Pulse Audio.

The goal of this effort is to make it possible to hook in various kind of audio effects into PulseAudio, including echo cancellation, so that as an application you can just tell PulseAudio that you want it to give you echo cancellation between an incoming and outgoing channel. As a starting point we will port some open source echo cancellation implementations to this framework, with one of them ending up as the default (the goal is that applications can just ask for the default, but that they can also ask for a specific one if it doesn’t want the default for some reason).

We hope this work will have a lot of positive long term effects, easier support for echo cancellation in applications, new improved echo cancellation algorithms and implementations being released and improved audio drivers on the linux desktop (not all drivers are doing a good job currently).

So in the coming weeks Wim Taymans will be leading this effort on our side and I will try to keep you up to date on it as it progresses.

So a big thanks to NLnet for making this possible.

As many of you might be aware, Google today announced the open source release of the WebM Project and VP8 codec. What you might not be aware of is that Collabora Multimedia and Entropy Wave have been working with the WebM team and due to this are able to announce the availability of a full set of GStreamer plugins for this new and exciting video format, the needed updates to support the WebM container format and finally we have been working with Xiph.org and Monty to announce the availability of a Ogg container format mapping for WebM, which we have also implemented support for in GStreamer. So by grabbing our WebM branches from GStreamer git you can today do the following things with all GStreamer applications:

• Encode video into the WebM VP8 video format
• Decode videos which are in the WebM video format
• Mux VP8 and Vorbis into the official WebM container format (based on Matroska)
• Demux WebM files with VP8 and Vorbis
• Stream VP8 video as part of Ogg http streams
• Mux and demux VP8 into Ogg container format

We also hope to be working with the WebM project community to offer RTP streaming of VP8 as soon as possible after this launch.

So a big thanks to the good people at Google for releasing WebM to the world and for working with us and other members of the open source community to enable WebM usage in the open source community from day one.

So for the actual code all patches will be committed to gst-plugins-good/base/bad and will be available in new pre-releases today

For those of you running latest releases and prefer to stick with that until the next full release then patches against latest releases will be available from these locations (web interface):
http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/slomo/gst-plugins-base.git
http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/slomo/gst-plugins-bad.git
http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/slomo/gst-plugins-good.git

You can read more about the WebM release at the official WebM blog post.

You find the official joint press release of Collabora Multimedia and Entropy Wave here.

Update: Thought I should also link to Montys blog which gives the official Xiph.org view.

Currently staying at my friend David Schleefs place in San Francisco. Davids company Entropy Wave is about to launch some rather cool new hardware encoders rack boxes, which David showed of during the CE Linux showcase. The boxes will support both Theora and H264 encoding to enable the easy creation of HTML5 friendly content. People where also quite impressed by Davids DSP port of Theora for Texas Instruments OMAP3 which was sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation, there was also some interest by other chipset vendors to get David to also port it to their architectures which could be a great development in terms of Theora based HTML5 support on mobile and embedded devices.

I was here to attend the CE Linux and Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit conferences this week and its been interesting. Btw, thanks to Google for the Nexus One phone, will be interesting to get home and do a throughout comparison with my Nokia N900. One thing I already discovered doing some prelimenary testing is that the Nexus One doesn’t seem to support syncing contacts over bluetooth, so its a bit of a cumbersome process it seems to move my address book onto the Nexus One from the N900. Talking of Google, the most repeated rumour, from a lot of people at the conference all claiming inside sources at Google, is that Google is about to open source the VP8 codec, using it both for Google Talk video conferencing, for HTML5 in Android and Chrome, and for You Tube. Will be interesting to see if this happens though and under what terms in the end. And if it happens it will be equally interesting to see if the quality of the encoder is good. Heard some claims that the current VP8 encoder actually creates worse quality videos than the latest Theora encoder at the same bitrate, which would make Googles refusal to support Theora for HTML5 for Youtube a bit sad.

Got to talk to quite a bit of people using GStreamer on their products, and I based on those conversations I can easily foresee that we will be getting more contracts in the future, at Collabora Multimedia, which task is basically mainlining vendor patches for things like GStreamer and Pulse Audio from vendors who are using these libraries in their products. While most companies wanted to see their patches go upstream to avoid eternal pains of maintaining and re-applying their modifications, they seem to have trouble allocating staff needed to make it happen. So hiring specialists like us to do the needed patch clean-ups and get them ready to be merged is easier to fit into their timetables and budget. Tim Bird, the chairman of the CE Linux forum, actually mentioned in one of his talks that this was the method that a lot of their members have found to be most cost effective in terms of getting patches upstream to a lot of different projects, hiring core contributors to the project in question as consultants to take the patches to a stage where they can be merged.

Last night I attended a GNOME dinner hosted by Adam Dingle of Yorba.org fame, seems Yorba is making good progress on their projects, with Shotwell their photo manager, getting included in next version of Fedora. A big thanks to Adam for setting up this dinner, much appreciated.

The other thing that I am wondering about at this point is whether I will actually be able to fly back to the UK on Sunday. With the volcanic ash messing up everything I am starting to worry a bit. Seems BA though is re-routing their US flights to Glasgow and then providing buses to take people down to London. Not to excited about the prospect of a 6.5 hour bus ride though, but I guess considering the circumstances I shouldn’t complain. And if I do end up getting stuck here then there are not a lot of places in the world I would choose over San Francisco to be stuck, it is an really great city. However since getting stuck in San Francisco would also mean a delay in seeing the most wonderful woman in the world again, I am not in a good position to enjoy having my stay in San Francisco extended.

Anyway, no use in worrying about my flight until Sunday, in the meantime I am looking forward to Mike Smiths birthday party tomorrow, especially since Mike is taking the step of joining me in the 30+ old geezer club.